ChangeOrder

A Hundred to One

When I first moved to Seattle, I freelanced at what was considered to be the meat grinder of the Seattle agency world. My first assignment was to serve as a production artist for a series of pet food ads. I was provided with layouts in QuarkXPress 4.0, consisting of a few dozen black and white portraits of happy Scotties, terriers, and other sedan-sized pups. The traffic person then handed me sheet of paper completely filled with three- to six-word phrases. "These are the headlines for the ads due today," she said, and scooted away.

I spent the next few minutes puzzling over the page. Some of the lines made no sense to me, outlining in scientific terms the benefits of Pet Food Special Formulation A to Crappy Pet Food Type B. Others were clever puns and riffs on animal lingo. The rest of the lines seemed like doggrel, and at the time I didn't really understand why the writer had even included them.

Until that point, I'd never been exposed to the full brain dump of a creative person, and while I could see which lines were pretty good, I was a bit stumped as to which would make the best ads.

Nine Proofreading Tricks for Designers

No one likes a typo. Especially clients.

When it's the 14th time we've made revisions on the 128-page magazine and you need to get the files off to the printer, it's inevitable that a typesetting error or grammatical mistake is still lurking somewhere in the document. The same issues apply when completing content for a website and porting it into a CMS, where gremlins always seem to lurk in the hallways of our code.

Mistakes happen, but we can catch them. Try out the following tricks from the proofreader's playbook.

Short URLs, Say Hello to Marketing

Want some http://co.ke/tonite?

If you're investing in sending out a high volume of tweets for yourself or your company -- and you happen to possess a fairly rabid fan base -- it would be interesting to explore if you'd receive more click-throughs to your tweets as a result of vanity short URLs.

Every Word Counts

On the restaurant's Web site: penne pasta, seared oyster mushrooms, greens, basil, reggiano.

At the actual restaurant: penne pasta, winter greens, alfredo.

Not much difference, right?

Except that I was totally starving. I'd walked ten minutes out of my way in the bitter cold, just because this walk-up's food was totally killer. And they didn't say on their Web site the magic word: "alfredo."

I'm not a totally persnickety eater. I have no problem with a little cream on my noodles. They may have run out of ingredients and made a substitution in a pinch.

But what I thought I was eating for lunch wasn't exactly what I'd expected. I'd had in mind an olive oil-based sauce with shaved cheese on top... or maybe with a hint of tomato snuck into the pot while they were making a reduction.. and so on..

You've had this feeling too. This is exactly what happens when your copy on your Web site isn't precise.